To Die Like a Man
by Alcuin Fromm
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 3
For the first time in two nights, Raille slept well. A certain calm that had come over him. Life seemed to be returning to normal, and he felt more and more convinced that it had been a wise choice to avoid any dealings with Wistill.
After his normal morning preparations, he floated to the cockpit to check over the ship. The Callia Mae was on the new course he had ordered Alloryio to make. Their position, however, was not at all what Raille had expected. The ship was not nearly as far along as she should have been. Raille quickly discovered the reason: their velocity had been decreased by fourteen percent.
He tapped the display console in front of him and brought up the internal comm. “Uunstet, please verify velocity change by negative point-one-four.”
No one answered.
“Uunstet, please report.”
A lone crackle of static was the only response. Raille hit another button. “Alloryio?”
After a short pause, a sleepy voice answered. “Yes?”
“Have you seen Uunstet?”
“No, Captain. Not since yesterday afternoon. Maybe he’s still sleeping.”
Raille unstrapped himself and floated out of the cockpit, across the central hub and over to the crew’s corridor. He pulled himself along the corridor wall and stopped at Uunstet’s cabin, knocked, and waited. There was no response. Alloryio floated down the corridor from the other end, yawning. Raille shot him a glance then returned his attention to the door, frowning at it.
“You should be in a flight suit, first mate,” said Raille sharply.
Alloryio said nothing, but floated up next to Raille, who knocked harder and louder. Still no answer came. Finally, he activated a small display screen next to the door’s bio-sensor and entered his override command codes. The door slid open.
Uunstet was floating in the middle of the room, facing away from the door, his head pointed down. Rotating in a lazy circle next to him was a generic, plastic drinking cylinder, and not far from that floated one of the ship’s medication jet injectors. Raille braced himself with one hand on the doorjamb and reached out for Uunstet with the other. He turned the man around and right-side up, then drew a sharp breath.
“Oh no,” he said quietly.
The Chief Engineer’s face was pale and lifeless, his eyes half-closed and his jaw slack.
“Overdose,” said Alloryio. “Look at that jet injector,”
Raille reached inside the heavy synthetic sleeve of the man’s flight suit, checking for a pulse, but there was none. Uunstet was dead.
“He must’ve drunk whiskey, then shot up.”. said Alloryio. “What a shame.”
Raille rotated Uunstet’s corpse horizontally, then pushed off the wall, carrying the dead man across the cabin and laying him on his bunk. He collected the cylinder and injector and examined them. The cylinder was more than half full. Raille sniffed it. It smelled like whiskey. He then looked at the injector which still held an empty dosage bottle of the ship’s opioid in its cartridge cavity. He looked at Alloryio and watched him closely.
Alloryio shrugged his shoulders. “Beats me. He likes his drinking and I guess he likes his drugs. Too much, eh?”
“You knew it was whiskey,” said Raille.
There was a silence.
“Yeah, sure,” said Alloryio, “that’s his favorite.”
Alloryio’s face was impassive. He looked at the ground then turned his gaze towards Raille. They locked eyes. Raille tried to penetrate Alloryio’s unblinking expression, but could not and finally relented, turning back to Uunstet.
“We’ll put on his helmet and gloves and then seal off this room until we get to Memlock.”
“Yes, Captain. I’ll go get suited up.”
Raille nodded absently. Alloryio floated out the cabin and down the corridor. Raille floated to the central hub and then to the airlock. Lined along the aft wall were helmets, gloves, spare suits, and oxygen backpacks designed to attach or detach easily from the flight suits. He came back to Uunstet’s cabin with a helmet and pair of gloves. He carefully locked the pieces onto the suit, noticing a bruise on the back of Uunstet’s right hand and another, larger bruise on the side of his neck.
Raille sealed the intake vent on the right shoulder of the suit used to connect to the oxygen packs. Finally, he tucked the dead man, already rigid, into his bunk’s sleeping sack and zipped it up to his neck. With a final sad look, Raille left the cabin and locked the door behind him.
He was shaky and had a terrible headache. He floated down the corridor, across the central hub and over to the medlab. The bright lights made him wince as he activated them, and his headache throbbed all the more for it. He rummaged through the cabinets until he found a small tube of a gel containing an anti-inflammatory drug. He ripped it open and squeezed the gel into his mouth, shuddering more from the artificial sweetener than from the medicinal flavor.
Raille massaged his temples, sad and confused about Uunstet’s death. He glanced absently through a transparent window in the cabinet where, two days ago, he had put away the bottles of meds that had been floating loose. They were all lined-up in their rows. One of the slots was empty, from which a dose of opioid had been taken and put into the jet injector that still floated in Uunstet’s room.
He scanned the rows of bottles unthinkingly. They all looked the same until suddenly, they changed color. Raille blinked in surprise and leaned in towards the cabinet, looking more carefully. He quickly realized that none of the bottles had actually changed color, but some in the opioid row had a different shade than the others. Raille opened the cabinet and got so close that his nose almost touched the doses. He counted them. Five of the opioid doses looked different than others. The five doses were empty.
Raille launched himself from the medlab and across the central hub to the cockpit. His heart sank as he found Alloryio already there, suited up in the co-pilot’s seat. Raille floated to his captain’s seat and strapped in only one of the two straps. He nodded to Alloryio as casually as possible. Alloryio was occupied with his display of the ship’s position.
“We’re at a fourteen percent velocity decrease from yesterday’s course,” said Raille.
“Yes, there were asteroids approaching. I decreased the velocity to avoid them.”
And then Raille noticed that the external sensors had been deactivated. “The sensors are offline,” he said.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess so. Must be one of the computer glitches after the explosion.”
“Must be,” said Raille.
Raille activated the sensors and waited for the first scan results to cycle through and update. A few moments later, a blip appeared on the display. Raille was not surprised. It was the Threen bearing down hard on them.
Raille scrolled through the communications list, but did not find what he was looking for. Alloryio must have deleted the call log.
“When did you make contact with Wistill?” he asked with a cold voice.
Alloryio looked up and stared straight ahead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Captain,” he said slowly.
A red light began to flash, indicating an incoming comm link from the Threen. She was close enough now for a live conversation, and getting closer. Raille examined the sensor report. Wistill had sent him false registration codes. The Threen, if that was her name at all, was not a freight cruiser but a modified light frigate. The Mae could not outrun her now that they were so close and, despite the Mae’s two projectile canons, the Threen was equipped with energy shielding to nullify the projectiles. And if the Threen had even rudimentary armament, she could easily disable the Mae. Raille stared at the flashing light.
“Are you going to answer?” asked Alloryio.
Raille looked over at his first mate who turned to meet the gaze. Alloryio’s face was as unreadable as ever. Raille turned away from him and put the incoming message on his display screen.
“This is Captain Nithan Raille of the Merchant Marine Ship Callia Mae.”
Wistill’s grinning face filled the screen. “Greetings, Captain. This is Captain Brellon Wistill of the Threen. Not quite what you were expecting, I suppose? But one thing is certainly true. Our cargo bay is empty, empty, empty. So sad. Have you considered the story I told you? That first mate of yours sure has and he’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
For a long time, no one said anything. Raille saw no escape. Wistill had decided. Alloryio had decided. Uunstet was dead. The visions of wealth and comfort returned to him, followed by other visions of death and murder. But finally, a quiet memory of his grandfather passed through his mind. “I have considered your story, and my answer is no.”
Copyright © 2022 by Alcuin Fromm
